Secrets Coming To Life
by QuickSilverFox3
Summary: Written for The International Wizarding School Championship Round 2. Sometimes secrets can dominate a family, and other times they just need keeping long enough for the world to change.


School: Durmstrang Second Year  
Theme: Alohomora  
Prompts: Fleur Delacour [Character]; "You're my very own prince charming," she said. [Speech]; Hot and Sunny [Weather].  
Word count: 2205

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Fleur sighed as she settled into the armchair, feeling old aches and pain flare up in harsh sparks of pain before they retreated once more. It still seemed like a foreign world, like something out of a dream, this peace that had seemed so far away when the war was raging around them. It seemed like it would never end. And then it was over.

There were pockets of Death Eaters still, there always were. Fleur had grown up hearing stories of the takeover of France from her parents and her grandparents, never expecting to see the same in her own lifetime and praying that it wouldn't occur in her children's. She glanced towards the large window that lead out onto the front garden. Louis was lying on his back on the old and faded patchwork blanket Molly Weasley had given them when she found out Fleur was pregnant with Victoire. It had been new then, colours crisp and sharp, but there were some forces magic couldn't stand against and one of them was the sheer destructive power of three children. He was laughing, tiny chubby hands stretching up towards the sky, trying to grab the bubbles that Bill was creating with his wand. They shone so brightly in the sun, the day unusually warm and clear for this time of year. Fleur took a few seconds to admire her husband, pride swelling in her chest, feeling herself preen with excitement. Other people considered him lucky to have her, battle scarred as he was. Fleur knew she was lucky to have him, lucky to find a man who moved past her family heritage and loved her for her. Against all the odds, they had made it work.

Bill sensed her eyes on him, a benefit of his accidental wolfishness, and glanced up, his eyes flashing yellow as they met hers in the window. She smiled at him, blowing him a kiss, which he caught and pressed to his own lips. Sparks began to crackle between them before Dominque dived onto his back, sending him crashing to the floor, burst of laughter escaping them. Fleur hid her smile behind her hand. He would always be their Daddy, wolf and all. Nerves trickled through her as she cast her thoughts to the future. Her children didn't know about the... More magical side of their heritage. Not yet, just a few years longer for them to be unburdened by the potential consequences of part Veela and part werewolf. It wasn't necessarily a secret, except that it was. Just for now.

" _Maman?"  
_ Fleur turned her head partially, neck howling its frustration down her spine, eyes craning to see the section of the room still hidden from her.  
"Ah, Victoire. What is it mon poussin?"  
Her eldest toddled into the room, mouth agape in a yawn, one hand rubbing at an eye as she dragged one of Bill's old Weasley jumpers behind her.  
"Can you tell me _une historie?_ A secret one, just for me."  
"Just for you?" Fleur echoed, holding out her arms so Victoire could scramble into her lap, wincing as tiny elbows contacted some delicate internal organs, "So not one to share with your little sister and brother."

"Non," Victoire said sternly, fixing Fleur with a look she recognised from her own mother, one she knew she had absorbed throughout her own childhood. It was unnerving to see it reflected at her from her own daughter, but Fleur supposed that was the way of things. Other families may pass down great legacies or hidden treasures, the Delacour's passed down a secret lineage and a stern facial expression.  
"A secret story," Fleur mused, settling her daughter into a more comfortable position as she thought, rocking slightly as she did so, "I have just the one."

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All families have secrets. Some are small secrets like tiny pixies that live in the skirting boards, some have bigger secrets, great big snarling dogs they keep locked away barely out of sight. This family looked like a normal family. There was a grandmother and a grandfather, a mother and a father and two little girls.

 _"Were they a Wizarding family?"  
_ _"_ _Hush mon poussin. You will see."_

They lived in a big old house with an iron fence and lots of windows, so they were always able to see out into the garden. The two girls loved the garden and would run and play all day before they were called in for supper, but they were sad too. They were sad because they could not go beyond the garden into the world beyond. They could just see it, past the fence and the trees, from the very, very top of the tallest window and every day they would sneak up to that window and peek out at the world beyond their house. Because, you see, their grandmother was very beautiful.

When she was a young girl, she had men come from all over the world to try to marry her. She received so many presents that the doors to the house couldn't close. There were new dresses and perfumes and pets and portraits. But the grandmother had a cold heart, frozen like ice. She knew that she was very beautiful, and she didn't want a man who would marry her just because she was beautiful even though this was what was expected of her. There was a young serving boy who worked alongside his mother in their kitchens-

" _Why did they have people working there? Auntie Minnie said that is bad."  
"It was common at the time. Things are mostly different now but still people have servants in different places around the world. It's a job, like how I and Daddy work at the bank."  
"Oh, okay._"

There was a young serving boy in the kitchens who also loved the beautiful girl but he knew he could not offer her parents any rich gifts so he could marry her because he was very poor. So, he decided to become friends with the girl. He had seen how very lonely she was, and he wanted to make her feel better. So, he practiced very hard to not be enchanted by her beauty and he made her laugh through all his attempts. And little by little, he got better and better and little by little her heart thawed more and more until one morning she woke up and realised she was in love with the boy, and he was in love with her.

This was a very big problem because it was a different time then and they couldn't go and get married without her parents' permission. When they found out, they were furious. They locked their daughter away in the top of the tallest tower of the house and told the boy he would never see her again. The girl wept and wept, and the boy wept and wept because her parents were very powerful and would not be disobeyed.

But the boy was clever and sent the girl a message, hidden inside a flower. He told her he was going to go and seek his fortune and when he came back, they would be married regardless of what her parents or anyone else thought. It would bloom and repeat the message whenever she held it under bright sunlight, and she did so every single day.

 _Fleur paused, blinking away the fog of memory to glance down at her enraptured daughter. Large brown eyes stared unblinkingly up at her, the girl barely moving as her mind wandered the passageways of the story. Outside the sun was high in the sky, barely a cloud in the sky. She could hear Dominque's shrieking laughter and Bill's mock growls as he spun her around the lawn, Louis cooing at the sky, wriggling on the blanket to watch._

 _"_ _What happened next?" Victoire prompted softly, Fleur's attention snapping back to her. She smoothed one hand across her daughter's hair, so soft like hers and so red like Bill's. Fleur took a deep breath and continued._

There was a war and the man went off to fight in it. And the woman cried and cried in her tower, listening to his final message whenever the sun shone and every day she would watch out of the window for his return. The world forgot about her, locked away in the tower, and her suitors moved on. But then one day, she saw him, slowly walking to her home and returning to her, just like he always said he would. That night, they eloped, running away together to get married somewhere were her parents would never find them. And to do that, she had to be kept secret. So, she bought them a house, with lots of windows and a high fence to her, and her children safe. Because she wasn't meant to marry him, it was considered wrong to marry those different from you. But she loved him so very much that she didn't care. She would be kept a secret and they would be together.

She would always call him her Prince Charming because he rescued her from the tower.  
"You're my very own Prince Charming," she would say to him every day, just to make sure he never forgot.

And as time went on, they had a daughter who grew up to be just as beautiful as her mother. But she had to remain a secret too. It was a normal childhood, but she was always looking over her shoulder, denying what she was to keep her family safe. The world was dark when she was an adult, people were very scared and so the daughter made sure her family was safe and secret and she went travelling, visiting the places her mother's suitors had come from. But always she kept her parents' secret. And in time she found her own Prince Charming, a man she rescued while he was stranded on her travels, and they too fell in love and she told him her secret and they returned to the house.

The two girls, well they were secret too. But the world was changing and so, the eldest ventured out into the world. It was scary, telling the secret when people asked her, the secret her grandmother had kept all her life, but it made the girl proud. She was very beautiful as well, taking after her grandmother, but she was lonely. Everyone only saw the surface, but never what was underneath. And so, the girl tried, and she failed, but she never stopped being proud of her family, for all the gifts they had given her and the burdens they had struggled with for many, many years. The eldest girl, she found a little job, somewhere quiet and there her Prince Charming found her. He could see her, not just the secret she carried, and she loved him fully. But war broke out. The man she loved was hurt, and people couldn't see past the surface for him either. But she loved him, and he loved her. She told him he was her Prince Charming every time she could, because she knew time was precious, just like her Grandmother did.  
"You're my very own Prince Charming," she said. And so, he knew. The secret was only a very small secret now and she was proud of it.

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"That was a beautiful story love."  
"Daddy!" shrieked Victoire, using Fleur's lap as a springboard to fling herself into Bill's arms, the man barely managing to catch her without dislodging the other two children he carried. Fleur glanced out of the window, blinking heavily as if coming out of a deep sleep. The previously bright sun was hidden by the swiftly approaching cloud cover, the sea beginning to writhe just under the horizon.  
"Why don't you go and colour for a little bit before lunch?" Bill asked the older girls, carefully placing the snoozing Louis into the nearby bassinet as the two raced off, the sound of their footsteps echoing through the small house.

"The world will be better for them, barely a secret to keep at all," he said, leaning down to press a kiss to her cheek, grinning as she reciprocated the gesture. Fleur hummed in thought, idly kissing along the raised edge of a scar.  
"I worry," she said simply, tugging Bill down to curl into her lap, wrapping her arms around his neck and hiding her face into his shoulder.  
"I do too love. Being part Veela isn't the stigma it used to be. We can show them how to be proud of their heritage, like how you learned to be."  
Fleur chuckled, kissing Bill once more, before she sighed, eyes roaming the pictures on the wall before it alighted on one particular one. The two figures in it waved politely, their free arms wrapped around each other's waists, a flower dangling from a chain around the woman's neck.  
"You are my very own Prince Charming," she said seriously, tilting Bill's head with one finger so she could stare into his eyes, warm brown ringed with yellow.  
"Je t'aime," Bill said, a wry smile as he carefully formed the syllables.  
"I love you too."


End file.
